Original Article
Posthumanism, subjectivity, autobiography Stefan Herbrechter Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry, CV1 5FB, UK.
Abstract In the following essay I would like to go back and reconnect a few things that may have become disjointed in sketches of posthumanist theory. In particular, the points to revisit are: the poststructuralist critique of the subject, the postmodernist approach to autobiography and the notion of the posthuman itself. I will briefly return to the work of Haraway and Hayles, before setting out the relationship between the often proclaimed ‘death of the subject’, postmodern autobiography, and a few examples of what might be termed ‘posthuman auto-biographies’. Subjectivity (2012) 5, 327–347. doi:10.1057/sub.2012.13 Keywords: posthumanism; speciesism; subjectivity; autobiography; technology; animal studies
Post-human-ism As the posthuman gets a life, it will be fascinating to observe and engage adaptations of narrative lives routed through an imaginary of surfaces, networks, assemblages, prosthetics, and avatars. (Smith, 2011, p. 571) It’s probably fair to say that the official (auto)biography of posthumanism runs something like this: Traces of proto-posthumanist philosophy can be easily found in Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Heidegger and their attacks on various ideologemes of humanism. This critique was then taken further by the (in)famous antihumanism of the so-called ‘(French) poststructuralists’ (Althusser, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida y), who were translated, ‘homogenized’, received and institutionalized in the English-speaking
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world under the label ‘(French) theory’ and added to the larger movement called ‘postmodernism’. At the same time, the impact of new digital or information technologies was being felt and theorized in increasingly ‘interdisciplinary’ environments in the humanities and ‘(critical) science studies’. Two foundational texts are usually cited here, namely Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg manifesto’ (1985 [1991]) and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999). Both these texts (Hayles explicitly, Haraway implicitly), from a theoretical point of view, function according to the formula: posthumanism ¼ poststructuralist theory þ technics. The temptation has therefore been to see posthumanism as the ‘natural’ successor – in analogy with the popular idea that AI, cyborgs or digital machines function as successors to the human species – to the still too humanist postmodernist/poststructuralist paradigm. Which means of course that the poststructuralist theory responsible for the birth of this posthumanism supposedly merely has a ‘midwife’ function and thus needs to be ‘overcome’. This line of argument, however, to us seems rather simplistic and deterministic. In our work, over the past 10 years or so, Ivan Callus and I have been attempting to contest this story in a number of ways. First, there is a rampant technological determinism in what often passes for posthumanist thinking. The inevitability of the technological drive of a historical teleology one could call ‘posthumanization’ is usually just taken for granted. As technology is what makes us human and as ‘anthropotechnics’ (cf. Sloterdijk)1 is virtually synonymous with hominization, technological innovation must by definition be the motor of history. Although the first part of the thesis is certainly true, the second as we would argue is merely an ideological construction. There is thus a need for what we have referred to as a ‘posthumanism without technology’, in the sense that, following the Derridean logic of supplementarity, as the original techne¯ deconstructs the metaphysical idea of humanism (that is human nature) – namely that humans can somehow know and experience something like an essential humanness that defines ‘us’ (or humanity) as a species – the human is always already inhabited by something other than itself, something ‘inhuman’, which nevertheless necessarily defines the human. Digital or hightech, from a historical point of view, would thus be one possible form or maybe a period, or the latest, possibly last, stage of ‘(post)hominization’. In our work, we have instead focused on ‘prefigurations’ and ‘anticipations’ of this process and have argued that only a historically and theoretically aware thinking about these processes should deserve to be seen as ‘critical posthumanism’ (Herbrechter and Callus, 2003; 2004a; 2007; 2008; forthcoming a; Herbrechter and Callus, eds., 2004b; 2009; forthcoming b; and Herbrechter, 2009). In the following essay I would like to go back and reconnect a few things that may have become somewhat disjointed in the autobiographical sketch of posthumanist theory outlined above. In particular, the points to revisit are: the poststructuralist critique of the subject, the postmodernist approach to autobiography and the notion of the posthuman itself. I will briefly return 328
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to Haraway and Hayles, before setting out the relationship between the often proclaimed ‘death of the subject’, postmodern autobiography, and a few examples of what might be termed ‘posthuman auto-biographies’. Haraway’s ‘Cyborg manifesto’ (1991 [first 1985]) sets out what has proven to be a serious contender for a new (post-postmodern) ‘techno-metanarrive’. Here are, arguably, the central passages that have given birth to the currently dominant discursive form of ‘posthumanism’ (even if Haraway herself is not identifying with the label): By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation y . (p. 150) And again: By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks – language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures.(y) The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. (y) The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. (pp. 151–152) I want to highlight a number of questions these two passages raise and to which I’ll be returning in this essay: who is speaking here? Who is the narrator of this narrative? Who or what is left ‘outside’ this story? ‘Where’ and ‘when’ is the point of narration? I would argue that these questions play an important part in reading Haraway’s text as a kind of ‘autobiography’ (cf. ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a godess’ (p. 181)). The second seminal posthumanist text is N. Katherine Hayles’s, How We Became Posthuman (1999). The most frequently quoted and most programmatic passage is this one: What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. [y] First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman considers consciousness [y] as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures the human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. (pp. 2–3) This is followed by her main argument for an ‘embodied information politics’, after Turing: What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. This realization, with all its exfoliating implications, is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman. (p. xiv) It seems that the posthumanization process for Hayles is a reinscription of embodiment under new conditions, a new understanding of (post)human autobiography, in which the subject of inscription and the inscription process itself with all its forms of materiality might no longer be controllable by a ‘liberal humanist subject’ and instead will lead to new forms of (posthumanist) agency. The implications of this process will be dealt with in the last part of the argument below.
The Death of the Subject and Autobiography It’s worth reiterating that the ‘liberal humanist subject’ has been the main target of poststructuralist theory for decades. But even before that, the subject had already been declared dead by European structuralism, and has been living a kind of ghost or zombie existence ever since. The fact that the subject’s death has been enacted and repeated so many times, with its resurrection invoked on a regular basis, proves that the subject has always had the ontological (or rather 330
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hauntological) structure of a ghost2 – it is, in fact, an at once impossible and necessary device or dispositif.3 This is more or less the lesson (postmodern) theory has learned from a combination of Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Levinas and Derrida.4 It is also that which has made the concept of autobiography so complicated but also so popular in recent times. The very idea of autobiography relies on a subject (or a narrator) who is capable of remembering, interpreting and identifying with his or her life story. It is a very specific form of embodiment that usually conveys trust in the impression that the subject of the narration is identical to the subject of the narrative. This is, in fact, what guarantees self-sameness, that is an assurance that ‘I’ am ‘me’. Many complications trouble this model of autobiographical consciousness, usually referred to as ‘Cartesian’: there are, first of all, the earlier blows against this self-conscious ‘I’ from the figures referred to earlier (whose work is sometimes grouped under the term ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’). Nietzsche critiques the objectivity and the truth of the subject through his notion of the ‘will to power’. Freud’s main claim is that the ego is not the master in its own house, that is the autobiographical ‘I’ cannot be trusted with its own story because it is partly written by other, namely unconscious, forces, under the influence of protective mechanisms, censorship and unconscious desires. Marx adds the idea that a subject is subject to ideologies and therefore not fully aware of its implication in larger political schemes, that is one could adapt Marx’s famous dictum and say: humans write their (autobiographical) stories but not under the conditions of their own making. Darwin, of course, detects another logic at work in human undertakings. There are at least two versions of autobiography in every human subject – the individual biography and the autobiography of the species, which stand in a kind of dialogue with each other and are largely determined by biology, genetics and evolution. Poststructuralism radicalizes these forms of suspicion, all directed against the idea that subjects are free and competent to give an accurate account of themselves, by further problematizing a number of aspects, many of them related to the specific understanding of language (as based on Saussurean linguistics, namely that language is an abstract and culturally constructed system of (often binary) differences): Lacan rereads Freud in terms of linguistics and differentiates within each subject between an imaginary (narcissistic), symbolic (social) and real (unconscious) order. The conscious subject, for Lacan, is based on a double misrecognition – a narcissistic misrecognition with an idealized other and a social misrecognition based on an equally narcissistic illusion of mastering language. Both identity and language, however, come from an other, which means that the subject is identified and spoken rather than being in control of his or her auto- (or, rather, auto-hetero-) biography. Althusser brings together Lacanian psychoanalysis, a Marxist understanding of ideology and aspects of (Saussure’s and Benveniste’s) linguistics. For him, the r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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subject is fundamentally an addressing device, a pronoun shifter that allows to connect between a ‘you’ and a ‘me/I/we’, and switch between these, through the mechanism of hailing. It is because subjects can be subjected to an address (by other subjects) that they can become subjects in the first place. A subject is therefore first and foremost a position or positioning, or a vulnerability in terms of lacking awareness about the very fact of being positioned (hence the ideological misrecognition of the liberal subject being interpellated as ‘free’). The necessary but unacceptable position of the subject of autobiography would lie in the fact that ‘I’ write about my ‘self’ as the ‘free’ subject of my own (life) narrative, or ‘I’ ‘am’ the main character in ‘my’ ‘own’ life story. Foucault adds to this an analysis of the larger discursive power structures that work as much at a ‘micro’, or, individual, level as on larger, societal or ‘macro’, levels. Instead of oppression, modern societies rely on self-disciplining through processes of bio-politics, subjectivity and embodiment. A subject for Foucault is a subject of (that is both exercising and receiving) power who adapts to socio-political pressures by working on ‘it(s) self’. An autobiography in the Foucauldian sense can therefore only be the inscription of biopolitics into a narrative by a more or less empowered self as subject. Both Levinas and Derrida stress another aporia at the heart of the subject and therefore of autobiography. There is a temporal and spatial delusion at work in the idea of a subject’s self-presence. The subject is the effect of an ‘Other’ (who, in Levinas’s theological model, is ultimately God as experienced in the face of another human; in Derrida, this other is an unknowable who has the structure of a trace or of ‘diffe´rance’ – a ‘non-present’ presence that can never be made present as such because it is always deferred and thus always differs from itself, like a trace). This other always precedes and gives rise to the subject’s impression of self-presence and identity – an identity that is, in fact, always merely an identity that comes to ‘me’ from an ‘earlier’ but ‘unknowable’ ‘Other’. In short, as necessary it may be to remain sceptical of any notion of the subject and as desirable as it may be to ask ‘who comes after the subject?’ (cf. Cadava et al (1991) and our commentary in the introduction above), poststructuralism and deconstruction never really proclaimed the ‘death of the subject’, simply because anything human (including the post-, trans- or inhuman) is (literally and letterally, that is through and in language) unthinkable without a notion of subjectivity. With this complicated (necessary and impossible, necessary because impossible) notion of the subject in mind, I will now return to the question of posthumanism and autobiography.5
Addressing the Posthumanist Subject Narrating lives intersects with theorizing the posthuman, as the very concepts of memory and embodiment, at the heart of life writing, are put under pressure. (Smith, 2011, p. 570) 332
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Nobody will seriously contest the challenge that some of the new and ongoing technohistorical developments (informatization, digitalization, cyborgization, cognitization and so on, which can be grouped under the term ‘posthumanization’) pose to a traditional (liberal) humanist understanding of what it means to be ‘me’ and ‘human’. There is, understandably, an apocalyptic tone in many writings about the posthuman. However, the task is to critically examine posthumanism – its challenges and potential – through the actual subject positions it provides, affords or constructs. There is no reason why Althusser’s basic conception of the subject should not apply under posthumanist or even posthuman conditions, provided one is aware of Althusser’s antihumanist blindspot. Although Althusser seems to have an ideal addressee in mind in his description of his ‘little ideological theatre’ (namely a Frenchspeaking, probably white, male) who is of course tacitly assumed to be ‘human’, alternative and less ethno- and anthropocentric scenes of interpellation under posthuman(ist) conditions are imaginable and have been occurring on a daily basis.6 The interpellation mechanism is by no means suspended under new technocultural conditions. However, humans can of course be interpellated by a whole variety of social actors: machines, animals, things and so on. Machines, animals, things and so on can also be addressed by humans and, provided they can somehow embody these positions all can also be attributed with subjectivity, which means that when machines address machines, animals, things and so on, or when animals address y and so on, aspects of subjectivity are involved. Therefore, far from any end to subjectivity, posthuman(ist) conditions rather imply a proliferation of subjectivity, ideology and address or forms and instances of interpellation. Although the posthumanist critique of humanism often employs seemingly overwhelming and disarming scientific and technological challenges, there are conceptual aspects that apply even without technology. The major conceptual challenge is the idea of a post- or non-anthropocentric worldview that a critical posthumanism implies. Seeing the world and ‘ourselves’ no longer as the central meaningful entity in the universe, and challenging our ingrained habit to anthropomorphize everything that comes into human view – these are the main targets of a ‘critical’ posthumanism, which looks for points of articulation outside a necessarily human-centred discourse like humanism. This has several implications for autobiography and subjectivity. One is that autobiographies by subjects other than humans become literally thinkable (that is outside the typical anthropomorphism in which a human subject merely takes on the identity of a fictional non-human actor). Another is the proliferation of human and non-human forms of interpellation, subjectification and embodiment mentioned above. To start with the latter, we can look again towards Donna Haraway and her more recent work on companion species, which provides us with the beginning of a theoretical framework for non-anthropocentric posthumanist r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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forms of address and subjectivities. In her When Species Meet (2008), she explains that: y human beings are not uniquely obligated to and gifted with responsibility; (y) animals in all their worlds, are response-able in the same sense as people are y . (p. 71) Haraway’s notion of ‘response-ability’, which she, in this context, restricts to the interaction between companion species (that is human and non-human companion animals) and the proliferation of subjectivities this implies, poses a number of political and ethical challenges. Haraway’s suggested framework for dealing with these challenges is ‘multi-species flourishing’: Now, how to address that response-ability (which is always experienced in the company of significant others, in this case, the animals)? (y) multispecies flourishing requires a robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is accountable to irreducible differences. (pp. 89–90) Haraway’s answer to this challenge lies in a new (posthumanist, postanthropocentric) ‘ecology’: We are face-to-face, in the company of significant others, companion species to each other. That is not romantic or idealist, but mundane and consequential in the little things that make lives. (p. 93) One could argue that from a posthumanist point of view, Haraway’s ecology should probably be extended to all kinds of social actors (human, animal, machine, collectivities and networks (cf. Bruno Latour, 2005)). The resulting complexification of such a ‘postanthropocentralized’ environment has obvious implications for the genre of autobiography.
Posthumanism and Autobiography Embodiment as the ground of autobiographical acts and practices is changing radically y. (Smith, 2011, p. 570; my italics) The autobiographic genre ‘faces’ further proliferation and fragmentation as a result of a posthumanist and postanthropocentric ecology. Every component of the term ‘auto-bio-graphy’ is being challenged afresh by posthumanism: in short, the auto- in autobiography is seen as an instance of auto-affection, which relies on an inappropriable (inhuman) other. The bio- in autobiography is exposed to the challenge as to what constitutes the biological element in every 334
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narration of a ‘life’ (the now often preferred term of ‘life writing’ for autobiography remains, in terms of subjectivity, quite ambiguous: that is is the ‘life’ in ‘life writing’ a subjective or an objective genitive?); finally, the question of writing in autobiography is being raised again with more urgency by new forms and media of inscription. It is, for example, worth remembering that the Derridean notion of the trace, mentioned above, was from the start never restricted to any human logic of writing, or to forms of inscription exclusively effectuated by human subjects (Derrida 1976, p. 9). Under these conditions, it is no surprise that as the forms of subjectivity proliferate the genre of autobiography becomes more and more fragmented and subdivided into autofiction, life writing, memoir, autobio(s)copie and so on (cf. for example Lejeune, 1998). To somewhat counter this trend I would like to return to a crucial moment in the conceptual life of our understanding of autobiography, namely Paul de Man’s ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, in which de Man argues that the most fundamental, underlying aspect that holds for everything autobiographical (and which could thus serve as a point from which to critically evaluate the current posthumanist explosion of the genre). Indeed, Paul de Man maintains that autobiography: y is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution. The structure implies differentiation as well as similarity, since both depend on a substitutive exchange that constitutes the subject. This specular structure is interiorized in a text in which the author declares himself the subject of his own understanding, but this merely makes explicit the wider claim to authorship that takes place whenever a text is stated to be by someone and assumed to be understandable to the extent that this is the case. Which amounts to saying that any book with a readable title page is, to some extent, autobiographical. (de Man, 1984, p. 70) Every text articulated by some one (that is a subject) has the autoaffective characteristics de Man describes and is at least at one level autobiographical. However, as de Man continues: The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable selfknowledge – it does not – but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions. (p. 71) Even if one does not follow Paul de Man’s rhetoric-centred understanding of deconstruction to its textualist extremes, his understanding of ‘prosopopeia’ as r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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the central autobiographical trope remains central for an analysis of the autobiographical even in its current posthumanized form: Prosopopeia [prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon)] is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name y is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration. (p. 76) Giving a face to, or the opposite, taking a face away from, a narrated experience constitutes the fundamental rhetorical device of figuring or disfiguring autobiographical subjectivity as mask. However, de Man’s rather pessimistic conclusions might not be the only possible understanding of this ‘un/masking’ process. In fact, it is probably the underlying, non-articulated anthropocentrism and humanism in de Man’s model that explains the barely veiled cynicism in the following passage: As soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and the sense of a world accessible only in the privative way of understanding. Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause. (pp. 80–81) A rather more neutral evaluation becomes possible by assuming that the metaphorical figuration and disfiguration (together with its ‘real’ epistemological, ontological and material effects, of course) at work in any (autobiographical) instance of writing also applies to non-human subjects and to interactions between a whole variety of human and non-human agents, and within a variety of analog, digital, social and so on networks. Help with articulating this new framework for postanthropocentric and posthumanist autobiographical writing comes from Jacques Derrida, who problematizes the genre and its laws by referring to it as ‘auto-bio-heterothanato-graphy’ (Derrida, 1991a, p. 198) and by picturing it as a specific ‘scene of writing’. In Circonfession, Derrida refers to the fundamental disjuncture at work in autobiography in these terms: y the uninterrupted auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic work, the only confidence that has ever interested me, but for whom? (Derrida, 1991a, p. 198; my translation) 336
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Indeed, one might ask, who is the ideal addressee of one’s autobiography? For whom does one write one’s autobiography? Derrida explains the impossibility of autobiography on the basis of a number of aporias (that is ‘necessary’, unresolvable contradictions). There is, first of all, the problem of self-identity and the name, that is ‘Am I that name?’ and the question of who is behind the figure of figuration, the defaced behind the face? Judith Butler’s explanation, in Giving an Account of Oneself, is helpful here: The ‘I’ can tell neither the story of its own emergence nor the conditions of its own possibility without bearing witness to a state of affairs to which one could not have been present, which are prior to one’s own emergence as a subject who can know, and so constitute a set of origins that one can narrate only at the expense of authoritative knowledge. (Butler, 2005, p. 37) Derrida articulates the problematic desire behind the autobiographical impluse through the relationship between auto-affection and death, that is the autobiographical ‘scene of writing’ necessarily passes through death. In an interview entitled ‘As If I Were Dead’ (Derrida, 2000), Derrida describes the im/possibility at the heart of externalizing one’s autobiographical experience: But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead? It means that you look at things the way they are as such, you look at the object as such. To perceive the object as such implies that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there y So, to relate to an object as such means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense. (p. 18) (y) What is absolutely scary is the idea of being dead while being quasi-dead, while looking at things from above, from beyond. But at the same time, it is the most reassuring hope we have that, although dead, we will continue to look, to listen to everything, to observe what’s going on. (p. 20) (y) I think it is bearable only because of the as if: ‘as if I were dead’. But the as if, the fiction, the quasi-, these are what protect us from the real event of death itself, if such a thing exists. (p. 22) If I necessarily have to write my autobiography ‘as if I were dead’, my autoaffection also necessarily risks turning into ‘auto-infection’ and ‘auto-immunity’: Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living would be an immunizing movement (y), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming autoimmunizing, as is every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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autonomous, autoreferential movement. Nothing risks becoming more poisonous than an autobiography, poisonous for itself in the first place, auto-infectious for the presumed signatory who is so auto-affected. (Derrida, 2002, p. 415) An autobiography is, strictly speaking, ‘deadly’ in the sense that it requires a self-positioning based on an identification with another, objectified, or ‘dead’, me – a relation to me as other that is regulated by unpredictable because unconscious processes of auto-immuno-in/affection. An additional complication here is the question of ‘zoography’ (or, the involvement of the ‘animal autrobiographique’).7 What part does ‘my’ animal/life (that is the human body or embodiment as such) – the zoe´ as opposed to the bios of any ‘me’ – play in ‘life’ writing or autobiography?8 There always seems to be an elusive zoographical trace underneath and a zoo-ontological other who precedes and ‘writes’, each biography. As Judith Butler explains: To be a body is, in some sense, to be deprived of having a full recollection of one’s life. There is a history to my body of which I can have no recollection. (Butler, 2005, p. 38) The indispensable writing body has its own zoographical ways of inscription that may not be articulable in traditional forms of autobiographical writing and works against the idea that autobiography as a genre usually relies on the authenticity of (bodily) experience. Here is Butler’s summary: If there is, then, a part of bodily experience as well – of what is indexed by the word exposure – that cannot be narrated but constitutes the bodily condition of one’s narrative account of oneself, then exposure constitutes one among several vexations in the effort to give a narrative account of oneself. There is (1) a non-narrativizable exposure that establishes my singularity, and there are (2) primary relations, irrecoverable, that form lasting and recurrent impressions in the history of my life, and so (3) a history that establishes my partial opacity to myself. Lastly, there are (4) norms that facilitate my telling about myself but that I do not author and that render me substitutable at the very moment that I seek to establish the history of my singularity. This last dispossession in language is intensified by the fact that I give an account of myself to someone, so that the narrative structure of my account is superseded by (5) the structure of address in which it takes place. (Butler, 2005, p. 39) There is thus always an experience of dispossession (or desubjectification) at work , which is experienced (or inscribed, registered) at a material, bodily level, and which is the necessary precondition for auto-affection to arise in the first 338
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place, but which can never be narrated as such. The body who experiences (or is materially inscribed with) the autobiography can never be the body who narrates the autobiography. There is, in fact, a disjuncture between bodies at work within the autobiographical process: material, somatic, phenomenological, narrating and narrated, to name but a few. In terms of the narrated body, Butler’s last two points, furthermore, coincide with a problem highlighted in Derrida’s notion of plus d’une langue (in his own autobiographical ‘language memoir’, Monolingualism of the Other (1996), which in terms of autobiography raises the question: what language constitutes the ‘me’ of an autobiography, given that (1) there is always more than one language at work (even within a/one language), and (2) there is never one (whole) language that can be made ‘present’ and thus guarantee the integrity and authority of a speaking subject? Derrida’s plus d’une langue is thus part of an explanation for the proliferation of the ‘language memoir’ as an autobiographical subgenre, but it has of course also a bearing on the more general question: what language(s) would a nonhuman subject write its autobiography in? Digital code? Biosemiotics? In ‘The animal that therefore I am’ (2002), Derrida articulates the more dangerous aspects these questions might have. Placed within the context of an inflation of seemingly innocuous autobiographies and autobiographical subjects outlined above, the danger becomes manifest if we return to the other side of posthumanism – the possibility of a literal defacement and disfiguration or disappearance of the human and the human species, including the whole human and non-human ecology that is affected or auto-affected by this. Derrida hints at this when he refers to ‘the autobiography of the human species’ (with its underlying ‘carnophallogocentrism’, cf. Derrida, 1991b): It will not be a matter of attacking frontally or antithetically the thesis of philosophical or common sense on the basis of which has been built the relation to the self, the presentation of the self of human life, the autobiography of the human species, the whole history of the self that man recounts to himself, that is to say the thesis of a limit as rupture or abyss between those who say ‘we men,’ ‘I, a man,’ and what this man among men who say ‘we,’ what he calls the animal or animals. (Derrida, 2002, p. 398) What holds for animal non-human others might again be extendable under posthumanist or postanthropocentric conditions to other non-human others and their interactions between themselves and others.
Posthuman(ist) Life writing In the future, surgically, genetically, or digitally altered models of embodiment will surely inform the tropes, narrative arcs, subject positions, and r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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affective charges of life writing. What new stories will we be telling of embodiment, simultaneously organic and technological, as emergent experiments in inhabiting bodies unsettle boundaries between species and species, human and inert, human and quantum? (Smith, 2011, p. 571) So are there specifically ‘posthumanist’ forms of life writing or autobiography that are aware of and address the issues raised above (and reflected in the epigraphs taken from Sidonie Smith’s recent MLA presidential address on the theme of ‘narrating lives’)? I can only give the very briefest of sketches of some examples of what kind of posthuman and/or posthumanist autobiographies are envisageable.9 It seems obvious that once the writing (of a) life, life writing, narrating lives, testimonies of lives and so on are no longer (exclusively) done by human subjects new autobiographical forms become possible. However, this development also reflects back on the generic markers of human and humanist autobiographies as such. Some generic changes are due to changes in (old) media (that is ‘retrofitting’ or ‘remediation’), others lie in the development of ‘new’ media. Again other changes are due to more invasive technologies and processes of ‘cyborgization’ or ‘prosthesization’ (that is new forms of techno-embodiment).10 Conceptual and/or social changes in our relationships to non-human others (animals, things, machines and so on) also lead to new forms of autobiography. In the context of an apocalyptic posthumanism already mentioned, the auto-hetero-thanatography of the human or the entire human species becomes a subgenre of its own. Examples can be found from the Romantic period onwards, in science fiction (where this seems to have become a major trope, that is humanity telling the story of its own replacement by machines, cf. Bladerunner, Terminator, Matrix y) and the recent rise of ‘docufiction’ programmes articulated from a fictional posthum(ane)ous position, on how the world would look ‘without us’ (cf. Life After people or The World without Us (Weisman, 2007)). The fundamental posthumanist question that all of these ‘scenes of writing’ gesture towards would be: is there writing ‘outside’ (before and after) the human?11 New (posthuman?) subjectivities are increasingly constructed in the form of what could be called the ‘tech-memoir’. A well-known example is Kevin Warwick’s I, Cyborg (2002), in which he narrates his experience of having a microchip implant. As Warwick is also a professor of cybernetics his motivation in writing an autobiography from the point of view of becoming-other or becoming-(one-with-the)-machine, however, is both personal (that is autobiographical) and technoscientific. His memoir could therefore be described as an ‘auto-hetero-techno-bio-graphy’. He begins by stating that: This book is all about me. One problem, when writing about oneself, is that it is extremely difficult to be objective. We tend to think we are in the right even when it is obvious we are in the wrong. When we win, well it 340
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was obvious, we were better than the other fellow. When we lose, then there was an obvious mistake, the referee was biased, or, failing that, we may have lost, but how we performed in doing so was in a much better way than the other guy. When looking at a situation from a human standpoint, it is just as difficult for us all to be objective. If we look at our abilities in comparison with other creatures it can be impossible for us to concede defeat on any point. At length we may concede that some creatures are faster or stronger, but at least we can fall back on the undeniable fact that we are obviously more intelligent than they are. (p. vii) As Warwick continues, this becomes even more complicated once we start taking the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ seriously: Unfortunately, since the advent of machine intelligence, even this stalwart reasoning has come into question. When we can clearly witness a Computer performing feats that we consider important aspects of intelligence – such as mathematical equations or fact retrieval – and easily outperforming humans in doing so, we try to find some excuse. (y) We say, well, it’s not really an intelligent act. Or, it’s not doing it in the right way. Or, it’s not conscious like we are. Or, worst of all, it’s not conscious at all – how can it be, it’s a machine. (p. vii) Warwick’s motivation, or his ethics and politics, is to overcome the antagonistic (humanist) stance and fully embrace or even ‘become’ the machinic other: What matters is performance. Whether we like it or not, we know that machines can perform aspects of intelligence with a performance that outshines those of humans. The question we can then ask ourselves is, okay, rather than admit defeat, can we join forces? After all, partnerships and alliances are often the most powerful combinations of all. In this instance, can we upgrade the human form, directly linking with technology to become cyborgs? (p. viii) In perfect analogy to de Man’s logic of de/facement, figuration and disfiguration outlined above, the experiment on himself, or rather his self, allows Warwick to put himself into the privileged position of writing about his experience and what it might mean to become cyborg: This is the story of my own attempt to push someway in that direction. Why should I want to do that? What led me to it? Why is it important to me? Most of all though, why do I think it is the most important topic facing the human race at this time? In reading these pages I hope that you will find answers to these questions and more. But please forgive me if you r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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I feel [sic] that I am only indicating my own point of view. Although I am writing this as a cyborg, I still suffer from that human frailty of a lack of objectivity, particularly when it is myself in the dock. (p. viii) What starts as a serious attempt at writing from a postanthropocentric or posthumanist point of view, however, quickly falls back on the old idea of human perfectibility and thus rejoins the humanist grand narrative. Somewhat more circumspect and uneasy is Jean-Luc Nancy’s short philosophical memoir about his experience of becoming a kind of cyborg, having been fitted with a pacemaker. In L’Intrus (2002), Nancy writes his ‘autohetero-techno-bio-graphy’ from the more metaphysical or phenomenological perspective of becoming inhuman or, at least, ‘differently’ human: What a strange self! It’s not that they opened me wide [be´ant] in order to change my heart. It is rather that this gaping open [be´ance] cannot be closed. (Every x-ray moreover shows this: the sternum is sewn through with twisted pieces of wire.) I am closed open. There is in fact an opening through which passes a stream of unremitting strangeness y It is thus my self who becomes my own intrus y . (p. 10) It is interesting to note, however, that Nancy, almost inevitably, employs the analogy of ‘cyborg’ (science fiction) or ‘zombie’ (horror movie): I am becoming like a science fiction adroid, or the living-dead, as my youngest son one day said to me. (p. 13) It is as if the only (techno)cultural imaginary available here was that of science fiction horror.12 This returns us to the question of technological determinism and posthumanism that we started with, and also to the role that science fiction might play in the contemporary cultural imaginary and its repertoire of tropes regarding the currently available forms of ‘constructions of the future’.13
Post-script: De-facebook The human relation to remembering is being reconfigured by the capacious, constantly updated and updatable archive that is the Internet. Every ort and fragment of digitalized life posted on a Facebook wall, on a blog, or in a tweet remain retrievable. This is an archive without an archivist, without rules of collection, and seemingly without rules of privacy. Far from encouraging purposeful self-representation or selfinvention, this vast memory machine may well constrict life writing. (Smith, 2011, p. 570) 342
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One final note on the potential of new (increasingly global or globalized social) media networks, which are beginning to have an impact on autobiographical practice and conceptualizations of the autobiographical. Gillian Whitlock, in Soft Weapons (2007), analyses the relationship between the ‘virtualization’ of autobiography within digital environments on the one hand, and the power shifts, which a global medium like the internet affords previously ‘liminal’ forms of autobiography. Increasingly, as she argues, autobiographical narrative is used as a ‘soft weapon’ by individuals but also powerful lobbies in their fight for recognition: It is now a given in autobiography criticism that the ‘I’ of autobiography and memoir has never been anything but virtual. (y) Any snapshot of the transits of life narrative must engage with the work of contemporary autobiography as it moves across cultures in conflict. Autobiography circulates as a ‘soft weapon.’ It can personalize and humanize categories of people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard. (pp. 1, 3) As promising as some of these aspects of new social media might seem, it is nevertheless worth spelling out, as Sidonie Smith (2011, p. 570 above) does, that there is a problematic side to this fragmentation and virtualization. The phenomenal success of social networks like Facebook certainly proves the new powerful alliance between autobiographical desire and the connectivity and interactive possibilities of digital media. However, it also raises the economic and ideological investment of digital capitalism in these emergent ‘posthumanist’ communities and new subjectivities. The new kind of subjectivity that digital environments like Facebook promote, sometimes referred to as the ‘prosumer’ (that is the (self)producing consumer of digitalized ‘information’), seems nevertheless to thrive on the traditional (humanist) narcissistic urge of the Cartesian subject. The autobiographical tropes of figuration and disfiguration (taking on avatars and an increasing variety of web-faces in order to find (old and new) ‘friends’ or merely to stay ‘in contact’ in an increasingly fragmented and virtualized environment) are being used ever more frantically in an attempt to integrate, control and empower a private self with an inevitably and irrecoverably public face. This extended and accelerated mechanism of online identity work may feel empowering but it also plays into the hands of the ubiquitous capitalist logic driving the increasingly commercialized web, which constantly attempts to exploit the ambiguous space between self-identity and autobiographical defacement. It is thus worth remembering that digital new media as well as sites and social networks like Facebook do not automatically lead to ‘empowered’ forms of autobiography. The ‘posthuman condition’ under which autobiographies are currently being produced have thus, on the one hand, greatly enhanced the opportunities for r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341
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‘giving an account of oneself’ to use again Butler’s phrase, which means that the potential for new post- or non-human subjectivities has also greatly increased. However, so has the deeply problematic proliferation of auto-affective and autoimmunitarian side-effects of the posthumanist or postanthropcentric subjectivity dispositif, to return to Agamben’s diagnosis of current capitalist society (2009, p. 20).
About the Author Stefan Herbrechter is Reader in Cultural Theory at the Coventry School of Art and Design (Coventry University, UK). He is the author of Posthumanismus (WBG, 2009) and of Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Alterity (Rodopi, 1999). He has also co-edited collections on The Matrix in Theory (Rodopi, 2006), Returning to Communities (Rodopi, 2006) and Metaphors of Economy (Rodopi, 2005). His translation into English, with Laurent Milesi, of Jacques Derrida’s H.C. for Life, That Is to Say y was published by Stanford University Press in 2006.
Notes 1 Anthropotechnics, in general, is based on the idea that humanness is defined through the use of specific tools or techniques. The term has been used by Peter Sloterdijk, however, in his project of a ‘prophetic anthropology’, to characterize humans as those beings who develop techniques that are designed to act upon humans themselves, namely in the form of a ‘self-taming’ or ‘selfengendering’ process (cf. Sloterdijk, 1999; 2001; 2009). Similar accounts of how humans are ‘originally’ connected to technology can be found in Bernard Stiegler’s work (Stiegler, 1998). 2 On the ‘inevitability’ of the subject see our introduction to this special issue, and its discussion of Cadava et al Who Comes after the Subject? (1991) in particular. 3 As far as the dispositif (or ‘apparatus’) is concerned, this originally Foucaudtian notion has recently been returned to the centre stage of theory by Giorgio Agamben, who sees the apparatus as ‘rooted in the very process of ‘humanization’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 16). According to Agamben, Foucault has shown ‘how, in a disciplinary society, apparatuses aim to create – through a series of practices, discourses, and bodies of knowledge – docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their ‘freedom’ as subjects in the very process of their desubjectification’ (pp. 19–20). What has changed under the current (arguably posthumanist) condition is that apparatuses ‘no longer act as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called desubjectification. (y) What we are now witnessing is that processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seem to become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the composition of a new subject, except in larval or, as it were, spectral form’ (pp. 20–21). Agamben’s overly pessimistic view is of course echoed in what follows; but as I would argue, there is also a more positive potential for posthumanist forms of auto-bio-graphical subjectivities as long as they are understood as ‘postanthropocentric’ (cf. below). 4 For a good introduction and reader of the main texts in question here I recommend Easthope and McGowan (2004). 5 For a more detailed and programmatic account of the continued relevance of subjectivity see Blackman et al (2008), who foreground the aspects of affect, experience, embodiment, materiality, agency and the relational or process character of subjectivity in contemporary theory. 344
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6 Cf. Easthope and McGowan (2004, pp. 42–50); see also Suzanne Gearhart’s critique in Herbrechter and Callus (eds. 2004a, pp. 178–204). 7 Autrobiography, according to the logic of the auto as becoming other (auto-hetero-biography) outlined by Derrida (2002, p. 415) and referred to above. 8 For the distinction between zoe¯ and bios see Agamben (1998). 9 Posthuman and posthumanist are by no means identical in this context: for example humanist autobiographies of posthumans are significantly easier to imagine than posthumanist autobiographies of humans. 10 The idea of techno-embodiment might be seen as one aspect of the growing interest in ‘body studies’, cf. for example the journal Body & Society, with its special issue on ‘Bodily Integrity’ (Blackman, 2010). 11 See also Matthew A. Taylor’s contribution to this special issue of Subjectivity. 12 While organ transplantation always seems to involve an experience of the body as a ‘stranger to itself’ this of course, by no means, inevitably leads to the use of techno-scientific metaphors (cf. Shildrick, 2002). The ways in which organ transplantation (and amputation) affects the somatic image of bodily integrity is the focus of a number of articles in the special issue of Body & Society, edited by Lisa Blackman (2010). Especially the contributions by Margret Shildrick (2010) and Vivian Sobchack (2010) are helpful here. So is Francisco Varela’s account of his liver transplant (Varela, 2001), which also discusses Nancy (2002; original French in 2000). I am grateful to the editors of Subjectivity for pointing out these references to me. 13 Cf. the contributions to the recent conference on this topic I organized: http://futures.uni-hd.de.
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Subjectivity, autobiography ¨ ber Anthropotechnik. Frankfurt, Sloterdijk, P. (2009) Du musst dein Leben a¨ndern: U Germany: Suhrkamp. Smith, R. (1995) Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, S. (2011) Narrating lives and contemporary imaginaries. PMLA 126(3): 564–574. Sobchack, V. (2010) Living a ‘phantom limb’: On the phenomenology of bodily integrity. Body & Society 16(3): 51–67. Stiegler, B. (1998) Time and Technics, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by G. Collins and R. Beardsworth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Varela, F.J. (2001) Intimate distances: Fragments for a phenomenology of organ transplantation. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7): 259–271. Warwick, K. (2002) I, Cyborg. London: Century/Random House. Weisman, A. (2007) The World without Us. New York: St. Martins. Whitlock, G. (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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